My experience of getting through the exam.

Although I’ve only recently started to post to this site, I’d just like to share with everyone my experience of the exam (passed as of this morning) as I found other peoples’ experiences very useful. Looking back at these previous comments over several months I’m left in little doubt that Sun has made the exam considerably harder since they first launched it 10 (?) months back. I’ve been using Servlets and JSP on and off for about 18 months and would not call myself overly experienced. I spent a couple of hours a day over a four month period revising – well there’s not much to do at work at present! In terms of resources I used to study with, I followed the herd and bought the latest copy of Marty Hall’s ‘More Servlets and Javaserver Pages’ and covered the parts of Servlets, JSP, tags etc that I was unaware of. I then used Ken Zrobok’s notes and cross-referenced them with Sun’s Servlet and JSP specs. All very good. After feeling I’d covered the exam objectives I did all the free mocks at least once and purchased Sun’s Mock. I’d highly recommend checking every answer on all mocks, whether you get them right or wrong – it really helps you learn the subtler points. Although, none of these mocks capture the exact feel of the exam (including Sun’s) they do come close. *** The help provided by the Javaranch site and its contributors was invaluable – many thanks everyone. *** The exam starts with a questionnaire about your experience and then you have to agree to Sun’s terms and conditions. Only then do you start the exam. The first question I didn’t even recognize and the most of them required careful reading. I can’t recall exactly how many questions on each section and I would guess it varies to a fair degree anyway. Things that stuck out were: (1)about 5 questions that require a typed answer; (2)web.xml tag questions are obscure – I learnt all the tags as per the exam objectives and it only just covered what was necessary; (3)you need to know more design patterns than just the suggested for – best see Miftah Khan’s notes; (4)I'll say it again - read all the questions very carefully. Time is not an issue. If anyone has more specific questions please post them and I’ll see what I can do. Peter Crowther. SCJP2, SCWCD – yippee!